I have been chatting with a friend about seeing the nobility of motherhood and homemaking and tracked down Chesterton’s famous essay on domesticity. It is worth repeating:
When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery,
all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word.
If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman
drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens
or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard
work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small
import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know
what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area,
deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley
within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets cakes.
and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals,
manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might
exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it.
How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about
the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children
about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing
to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s
function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it
is minute I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task;
I will never pity her for its smallness.
Similar to the concept of “simple but not easy” he points out that this vocation is ordinary – in the sense that so many are called to it. It is also extraordinary by the virtue of its indispensible impact. The truly immense things are rarely accompanied by fanfare and attention.
Dom Hubert Van Zeller explains the necessity of viewing one’s vocation with the proper perspective:
Once you have this sense of mission, this sense of dedication to a cause more worthwhile than any purely personal claim, the rest can follow.
My dear friend Jen often tells of hearing Elizabeth Elliot on the radio when she was home with her firstborn, having left a nursing career to be a homemaker. Surrounded by those who would have her believe she was wasting her potential she clung to Elizabeth Elliot’s assertion that if God has blessed you with children and a husband you need not fret over your ‘calling’ any longer. You can stop of musing over what your contribution to the world ought to be. It is right there before your eyes. All that is not to say that everyone can readily accept that what is before their eyes is as potentially as monumental as the ‘vocation over the hill’.
Mrs. Elliot feels this is because motherhood has suffered from profanity. Not swearing but rather:
treating as meaningless that which is freighted with meaning. Treating as common that which is hallowed. Regarding as a mere triviality what is really a divine design. Profanity is failure to see the inner mystery.
How often we miss the mystery. We disregard the divine in our midst, which is often hidden in the mundane.
Van Zeller concurs:
Another thing about this “drudgery” which we are all so afraid of and so eager to avoid: it can promote not only holines – in fact that is what it is for – but happiness as well.
If people only searched harder for the dignity that is hidden in labor and worried less about the drudgery that inevitably accompanies it, they would have time to look about them and see what kind of happiness it can be made to bring.
Our challenge is not in accomplishing the thousand and one inane tasks required of us on a given day. Our challenge is to view them rightly, to be sure to attribute to them the high value they hold. It is to our great advantage to fill our hearts and minds with the words of those who affirm the importance of this vocation. We must take every thought captive.
As Van Zeller says,
It is not that the fruit is bitter, it is that we have a wrong idea of sweetness.
